Comment Re:They won't miss it. (Score 1) 187
Yeah, but there're only so many anecdotes on a day without incendiary politics stories.
Comment Re:Riding coattails! (Score 2) 333
Chill out. We're all on the same side here. Wouldn't you, as a video host, much rather have to worry about supporting two open, royalty-free formats than several closed ones?
Submission + - Sir Isaac Newton, Alchemist
Hugh Pickens writes: "It wasn't easy being as obsessed about science as Sir Isaac Newton. Newton didn't play sports or a musical instrument, gamble at whist or gambol on a horse. Newton was unmarried, had no known romantic liaisons and may well have died, at the age of 85, with his virginity intact. But, when Natalie Angier writes in "The Hindu," that it is now becoming clear that Newton had time to spend thirty years of his life slaving over a furnace in search of the power to transmute one chemical element into another, it is somewhat akin to hearing that Einstein believed in astrology. "How could the ultimate scientist have been seemingly hornswoggled by a totemic psuedoscience like alchemy, which in its commonest rendering is described as the desire to transform lead into gold," writes Angier. Now new historical research describes how alchemy yielded a bounty of valuable spinoffs, including new drugs, brighter paints, stronger soaps and better booze. "Alchemy was synonymous with chemistry," says Dr. William Newman, "and chemistry was much bigger than transmutation." Newman adds that Newton's alchemical investigations helped yield one of his fundamental breakthroughs in physics: his discovery that white light is a mixture of colored rays that can be recombined with a lens. “I would go so far as to say that alchemy was crucial to Newton’s breakthroughs in optics,” says Newman. “He’s not just passing light through a prism — he’s resynthesizing it.”""
Slashdot Top Deals
The road to ruin is always in good repair, and the travellers pay the expense of it. -- Josh Billings
